Pretty: Block

Itsjustadreamitsjustadreamitsjustadreamitsjustadream. Running through her head, uncontrollably. Leah couldn't move, couldn't talk, couldn't even think straight. She stared down at the cobbles in the street, fascinated by the way her shadow wavered in the gaslight.

The tattooed man was named Ryan. Ryan had grown up in one of the cold public housing blocks that covered most of what used to be the suburbs. After the Cold, people who could afford it moved into the centers of the cities, where the Tubes were being built. In a mass tide, they displaced the poor from their traditional center-city homes and pushed them out, out away from the still-warm centers of population to the fringes. Like sheep huddling together during a winter storm, back when there were still sheep, the ones in the middle stayed the warmest.

Most people, living in the blocks, turned to crime out of sheer disgust with the system. If the Law told them to do one thing, they'd do the other, just because the Law was why they were stuck in those hastily-constructed poor houses that got most of their warmth from the city's composting piles. Massive amounts of organic matter, decaying and giving off precious warmth and oppressive stench. Save the gas heat for the rich, the poor get shit heat. So they flaunted the Law, taunted the Law, and did whatever they wanted. As long as the crime in the blocks stayed in the blocks, the Law didn't care. It had bigger problems.

Ryan was a prime product of the blocks. By the time he was ten, he had already learned hard lessons. He had been savagely beaten not once, but twice, both over some trifling violation of the protocol of the street. He had beaten others for similar offenses. He had killed a man for a sum of money that would not even pay for the lunch of one of the rich slicks that lived in the Tubes. By the time he was fourteen, he had fallen in with the Followers of Memory. It was a fruity name, he thought, but they gave him structure, a family. They gave him a job and a purpose and someone to call enemy. He went to the gatherings like he was supposed to, listened to the hooded and robed weirdoes talk about the All-Father and shit like that, but he didn't really care. He became a fairly proficient mover of illicit substances. He would take deliveries of whatever highs the crank spellers were cooking up from someone whose face he never saw, and he would distribute them to the street sellers. He never dealt in money, that was somebody else's job, but he did get to deal in discipline sometimes. If he thought the seller was getting into the supply, he'd break something to drive home the point. If he knew the seller was getting into it, he'd do more than just break something.

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